WhatEVAH!

Category archives for WhatEVAH!

Lest there be any doubt that I’m not as nuts in real life as I am on the blog, here’s a slide I used yesterday during a full-blown fancy-schmancy professional talk: Just saying. For context, read this post (IT HAZ SCIENTISMZ!!).

At D-squared Digest, some ruminations about Egypt lead to the bestest political science theory EVAH! (italics original; boldface mine): …so that brings me to a useful piece of advice for any readers who are aspiring dictators, one that the Communists knew, Suharto knew, but that some modern day tyrants seem to have forgotten. There is…

I appreciate the value of optimistic weather forecasters, as opposed to the usual doom-and-gloom types, but this seems a little too far in the other direction: Look at the bottom right: who plays golf in this weather? I don’t think even Scotsmen are that crazy…

Or not. By way of Paul Kedrosky, we come across this scintillating abstract: UP OR DOWN? A MALE ECONOMIST’S MANIFESTO ON THE TOILET SEAT ETIQUETTE JAY P. CHOI,† This paper develops an economic analysis of the toilet seat etiquette. I investigate whether there is any efficiency justification for the presumption that men should leave the…

By way of Thers at Whiskey Fire, we read that the evangelical movement has recognized that sometimes homeschooling doesn’t quite get the job done: Suppose you have home-schooled your advanced blastocyst in the best evangelical wingnut way, to the age of 18. And suppose you recognize that no matter how much you would like to…

…and there’s another important date right around then. First, the crazy: Exley is part of a movement of Christians loosely organized by radio broadcasts and websites, independent of churches and convinced by their reading of the Bible that the end of the world will begin May 21, 2011… “A lot of people might think, ‘The…

So I came across one of those text analyzing thingees, and subjected this blog to it. The site predicted that this blog is “written by a male somewhere between 36-50 years old.” OK. So far, so good. Then the writing style was described as “academic.” I suppose that’s right, but not too many academic papers…

Let no one say that the Mad Biologist doesn’t address the pressing issues of the day. While at the Human Microbiome Meeting, I’m staying in a hotel. Like other hotels I’ve stayed in for various meetings, my bed is covered with pillows. Not only were there four humongous pillows that I could use, but there…

Over at The Urban Ethnographer, we find this superb post about riding the subway that will be familiar to anyone who does so on a regular basis. What I love is the taxonomy of riders, including the “packers”: People carry large bulky items with them. In all fairness, though, packers need to be distinguished from…

This is what children with poor self-control become (from here) Melody Dye at Child’s Play has an interesting post about the famous (or infamous) cookie experiments, which involved observing children presented with a cookie and then left alone in a room. If they wait long enough, they get another cookie (and they know this). If…